Greetings in Christ, all!
I’m writing to you all this week about National Marriage Week: a great week our Church sets aside to honor and celebrate the Catholic Sacrament of Marriage. We, as Catholics, are the bride of Christ and He is Our Groom; the Sacrament of Marriage is to be a reflection of that perfect marriage of Christ to us.
Our Catechism has many great things to say about marriage, here is one of my favorites:
“The intimate community of life and love which constitutes the married state has been established by the Creator and endowed by him with its own proper laws. . . . God himself is the author of marriage. The vocation to marriage is written in the very nature of man and woman as they came from the hand of the Creator. Marriage is not a purely human institution despite the many variations it may have undergone through the centuries in different cultures, social structures, and spiritual attitudes. These differences should not cause us to forget its common and permanent characteristics. Although the dignity of this institution is not transparent everywhere with the same clarity, some sense of the greatness of the matrimonial union exists in all cultures. The well-being of the individual person and of both human and Christian society is closely bound up with the healthy state of conjugal and family life.”
In Canon Law, we define marriage as a “Covenant by which a man and a woman establish between themselves a partnership of the whole of life and which is ordered by its nature to the good of the spouses and the procreation and education of offspring.”
I think it’s a wonderful challenge for us to live in this culture, where the questions of the day have pushed us to look deeper into marriage and recommit ourselves to the vision God gave us through Christ.
I invite each of us to take some time this week and look over what our Catechism has to say about marriage and, if you wish, check out the website www.nationalmarriageweekusa.org to see some of the great resources our Church offers us to strengthen our marriage covenants.
No matter what else we do, let’s make sure to pray for all married couples: that they would grow in love of God and each other, and bless the world by raising up saints!
Here is a prayer the Church has given us for this week:
Almighty and eternal God,
You blessed the union of married couples
so that they might reflect the union of Christ
with his Church:
look with kindness on them.
Renew their marriage covenant,
increase your love in them,
and strengthen their bond of peace so that,
with their children,
they may always rejoice in the gift
of your blessing.
We ask this through Christ our Lord.
Amen
God bless you all!
fjk